


The Walls and Roof of This House

by J (j_writes)



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Pre-Canon, Threesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-03
Updated: 2012-05-03
Packaged: 2017-11-04 18:10:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/396727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_writes/pseuds/J
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I don't lie to Barton."  "He lies to you."  "Not very well.  Not as well as you do."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Walls and Roof of This House

**Author's Note:**

> written for the [Lover's Dictionary comment fest](http://pocky-slash.livejournal.com/1626558.html), for [this](http://pocky-slash.livejournal.com/1626558.html?thread=10278846#t10278846) prompt.

When Romanoff started at SHIELD, she spoke lies marginally more fluently than English, and everyone assumed that Coulson had been assigned to her because she couldn't be trusted. He alone was of the opinion that the reason had more to do with the fact that he could, and she hadn't been exposed to many people who fit that criteria. 

It took him three weeks to get a straight answer out of her about anything at all, and he got so used to expecting evasions that when it came, he nearly missed it.

"Someone asked me today," he told her, stepping into the space beside her at the range and loading a clip into his gun, "if you had tried to kill me yet."

"Only once," she replied, and he thought she was kidding until she looked at him and he saw an unfamiliar frankness in her expression. "Two years ago, in Budapest." 

He held her eyes for a moment, then raised an eyebrow in acknowledgement, turned, and emptied his gun into the target in front of him. When he turned back, she was packing her things away and not quite watching him.

"Fury knows?"

She nodded. "I didn't succeed," she told him. "He didn't consider it relevant."

He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the statement, but he could see the tightness at the corner of her mouth, the way she took too much care gathering her belongings, and he nodded instead. "Then neither do I," he told her, and the brief easing of the tension in her face as she almost smiled in response was the most unguarded he'd ever seen her look.  
______________

The first time he told her to leave him in the field, he thought she would. There was blood smeared across her cheek, more of it on her hands, and he couldn't tell how much was hers or his, or if it even mattered. Her hands were steady and capable against his side, but he could feel himself going numb from whatever was embedded in there, and he made his fingers work just long enough to tuck the tiny drive he was carrying into her pocket, pressing his hand there and feeling the warmth of her skin beneath her field suit.

"You have to go," he told her, "take this, and – " he could feel the words slurring, his tongue heavy and uncooperative, and the way she took his hand felt like goodbye.

He woke to the harsh lights of the medical wing, and could only make out the vaguest outline of her through the blinding glare as she leaned in and said severely, "Don't you _ever_ tell me to leave you in the field again." There was a harsh exhale, and then her shadow was pulling back, pacing beside the bed. "What kind of soldier do you think I am?"

He watched her until the motion made him faintly seasick, and closed his eyes. "The kind that works alone," he offered, and heard her footsteps pause.

"Not anymore," she told him, and he was glad that he couldn't quite make out whether the tone in her voice was relief or regret.  
______________

They were assigned to undercover work separately or not at all, their approaches so different as to be almost completely incompatible. She somehow managed to hover in a space between charming and threatening that he had never known existed, and drew the attention of every eye in the room without seeming to intend to at all. He, on the other hand, was a master at being solid, dependable, and instantly forgettable, the kind of guy that people talked around rather than to. He'd made a living out of being that guy, and it served him well, but he found himself watching Natasha on missions when he had the chance, admiring the skill with which she wrapped people around her finger and waited for them to hang themselves with their words.

They almost invariably did.

It took a while before the comments started, about how they were the only opposite sex team anyone could think of that hadn't been tapped for a mission where they went undercover as husband and wife, but once people started talking, the remarks were inescapable. Phil's standard response was to gesture towards Natasha, beautiful and deadly, then at himself.

"Would _you_ believe it?" he'd ask, laughing, and more times than not, that would be the end of it.

"That's your problem, you know," Natasha said one day, walking away from one such conversation, and Phil turned to look at her.

"What's that?"

"You ask them if they believe you," she said, "instead of telling them they do."

He gave her a lopsided smile. "Some things, I can sell," he said. "Most things, in fact. I don't think that's one of them."

"No?" She gave him an inscrutable look, then turned to eye a huddle of junior agents halfway down the hall. "Didn't anyone ever tell you that the first step to working successfully undercover – " she said, and without warning, her hand was at his tie, gripping it and shoving him into the wall. He flexed his fingers, almost reaching up to pry himself from her grasp, but then she was crowding into his space, pressing against him, her lips brushing against his ear as she continued in a low voice, "- is to make _yourself_ believe it?"

"No," he said, his voice calm and even, and he settled his hands against her hips, not quite pushing her away, but holding her where she was, keeping her from pressing forward. "Actually, I'm reasonably sure that's a good way to get yourself killed."

He felt rather than heard the tiny laugh she let out, and she pulled back slowly, seductively, splitting her glance between him and the junior agents, then turning and walking back they way they'd come from, her shoes clicking loudly in the hall as he straightened his tie and did his best to look like he had his shit more or less together.

The rumors had probably already been circulating – for an agency with military roots, SHIELD had a surprising proportion of people who never quite knew when to stop talking – but it didn't take long for him to start getting looks – some wary, some admiring, and a couple of actual comments of "Romanoff, huh? Nice," in the gym. He shrugged them all off, because it wasn't the first time he'd been rumored to be sleeping with a colleague, and at least it wasn't Fury this time.

"See?" Natasha asked a few nights later, appearing out of nowhere to lean against the doorframe of his office. "Apparently it's not so hard to believe after all."

He looked up at her, the smile tugging at the corner of her lips, and he couldn't help but shake his head and chuckle. "This is how you have fun, isn't it?"

She didn't answer, just returned his smile and walked away.  
______________

Neither of them hid their scars from each other.

It had been second nature to him since his military days, turning to a certain side when changing, letting an arm hang strategically over the jagged mark along his ribs, keeping his shirts buttoned neatly around his wrists except when he was alone in his office, or at home. She was as marked as he was, but casual about it in a way he had never considered being, and the first time they shared a hotel room and she stripped down to nearly nothing to change from her field suit to civvies, he took in the sight of her all at once, then carefully averted his eyes.

"I just sewed some of your skin back together," she reminded him. "I think the time for being a gentleman may have passed."

"Thank you for that, by the way," he said, pressing a hand to the bandage on his arm, and when his sleeves started to get uncomfortable against it a while later, he only hesitated briefly before rolling them up and settling in against the headboard with his computer propped on his lap.

He began to catalogue their missions by the marks left on her skin as well as his own – a bullet graze from somewhere in Canada for her, a shallow knife wound in the leg from Portugal for him, scrapes and bruises from Cuba for both of them that took too long to fade. He'd long since learned not to look on his own injuries as a condemnation, but he had to learn all over again when it came to her.

There were few things that were easy in their line of work, but somehow being in the field with her started to qualify, and it was a dull gray morning in London when he woke to discover that eventually, without meaning to, they'd begun to trust each other. Natasha was still asleep in the bed across from him, curled on her side, shirt rucked up to reveal the crisscrossing pattern of scars just over her left hip, and for the first time, her back was to Phil instead of the wall.  
______________

In the brief moments he'd allowed himself to think about it, he'd always assumed that if they ever did come to be together, it would be in the service of a mission, or in reaction to one. Instead, it was a rainy night in March and he opened his door to find her standing there with a bottle of vodka tucked under one arm and his scarf hanging loose around her neck.

She had a reason, but he never learned it. All he knew was that they sat on his couch passing the bottle between them, talking about nothing in particular until his limbs felt heavy and warm, and she was crawling into his lap, bracing herself above him and rocking against him like this was just another way they had learned to fit together.

They kissed themselves breathless, and kept their clothes on for longer than Phil had with anyone since he was a teenager. She rolled her hips against him until he was aching in his jeans, and when she finally got them just naked enough to sink down on him, he curved his hands over her hips and held on, pressing finger-shaped marks into her skin that he'd be cataloguing for days.

They were together sporadically, without expectations, and always outside of work. She'd show up at his door, or he'd show up at hers, and every once in a while they'd just go straight to one of their places after a mission, collapsing into bed together and working out some of the tension that brief bursts of fighting in the field couldn't relieve.

They took missions together and separately with some regularity, so when she called him one night to say, "I have an assignment," he knew that she didn't mean one that would take her days or weeks to complete. It took her seven minutes to get to his office from Fury's, and she was there for less than three, locking the door behind her and meeting him halfway around the desk, pressing herself against him and kissing him as if it were for the last time. When she pulled back, she was smiling, a real smile, unexpectedly real, and he couldn't help but return it.

"This is big, isn't it?" he asked her. "Whatever you're up to."

"Yes," she replied simply, and offered no more details. She pressed a hand flat to his chest, her finger playing at the edge of his tie, and then she was pulling away, backing towards the door. "Don't try to keep an eye on me," she warned, knowing him too well. "Fury might have you killed."

"Wouldn't want that," he said.

"No, somebody has to keep this place running for me to come back to."

"That's in the plan?" he asked. "Coming back?" He'd been with SHIELD long enough that he didn't expect an answer, and he didn't get one. She gave him the kind of smile that he'd never have believed her capable of in the early days, and left him sitting there in his office alone, staring unseeingly at the pale light coming from his computer, and wondering what was next.  
_______________

"I have a project for you," Fury told him, pointedly not adding _you look like you need one_. He slid a file across the desk towards Phil, and asked him how he felt about archery. 

There was a point in their lives when he'd known how to tell when Fury was kidding, but he'd lost the ability around the same time Fury lost the eye.

Clint Barton was a liability. He was showy and unstable, only dependable in his unpredictability, and he'd been forcibly reassigned from the last four teams he'd been put on. His takedown record, on the other hand, was so impeccable as to be practically impossible. "You'd think that someone would have given up assigning him teammates by now," Phil said dryly, and Fury looked at him steadily.

"Somebody did," he replied. "You're not his teammate. Your job is to make him capable of having one."

He spent a few days learning his way around Barton's life before he actually approached him, and it was sometime into the third day when Barton plunked himself down across from Phil at the lunch table and said, "If you're trying to get me in bed, you can just say so."

Phil blinked up at him mildly, and reached to remove his glasses. "I'm sorry?"

"Either you're doing some kind of research on the archer in his native habitat, or you're trying to get in my pants. I'm not saying I object to either, in principle, but I've got to tell you, you've already got something of a reputation around here." 

"So do you." Coulson tapped the folder in front of him for emphasis, and when Barton's fingers darted out for it, he pulled it away and stuffed it into his briefcase. "It's going to take a few decades for your security clearance to get that high," he informed him, and took a sip of his coffee.

"Yeah, well. Not all of us were handpicked for the agency by the director himself," Barton said with a mock sigh. "Thanks for implying that you think I'll make it decades, though. That has you at the higher end of the betting pool."

Phil raised an eyebrow at him. "Do you really think you'd have lasted through this many failed team assignments if you weren't one of those people?" he asked, and was gratified by the brief flicker of surprise in Barton's expression. He pushed back his chair and stood. "You're going to need a better poker face than that if you want to do anything around here that doesn't put you a few hundred feet from your targets," he said.

"Who says I want to?" Barton replied.

"You do," Phil told him, and looked down at his briefcase significantly. "It's all over these files, Barton. You could be doing more. You _should_ be."

The corner of Barton's mouth curved up as he looked Phil over. "And you're going to be the one to make me do that?"

"That's the idea."

"No, thanks."

Phil shrugged. "Up to you," he said. "I'll let the director know you've refused your fifth team assignment. I don't see that working in your favor with regards to the betting pool, though."

Barton's expression darkened, and he eyed Phil warily. "Who's the team?" he asked. Phil gestured down to himself, and Barton blinked. "That's it?"

"That's it."

"Should have led with that," Barton told him, and stood. "I guess this means you're not trying to get in my pants?"

"Not today, no," Phil told him dryly, and enjoyed the wicked smile he got in return a little too much.  
______________

Phil had spent enough years working with Fury and Natasha that he had lying down to an art form. He was convinced that he could have befuddled even Barton's well-honed bullshit detector, but every time he considered putting it to the test, something stopped him, and it was months into working together before he realized that he'd never told Barton a single lie.

It seemed a shame to ruin a streak, so he kept at it. There was a list a mile long of questions he wouldn't answer, and one twice that size of things he knew how to evade like a master, but having adopted a rare policy of honesty, he found it to be a new challenge to himself to make sure he didn't slip up.

In their seventh month working together, Clint's perch was caught at the edge of a blast radius that had been calculated under the assumption that Barton knew how to hold his position, and Phil found himself kneeling in a pile of rubble with Clint's hands fisted into his shirt, blood soaking through his clothes to his skin.

"Fucking _ow_ ," Clint said, his voice rough and almost unfamiliar. "Couldn't have called that one, boss?" 

"The calculations – " Phil began, then cut himself off, shaking his head. "You were out of formation."

"I was right where I needed to be," Clint informed him. 

"This is why you get kicked off all your teams, isn't it?" Phil asked.

"Among other reasons," Clint said, and winced as he tried to move. "Regretting your choice in assignments yet?" he asked.

Phil looked down at him, the way his head dropped to press against Phil's side, his fingers still tangled into his shirt, the way the lines around his eyes eased slightly as Phil rested a hand against his shoulder, and he shook his head. "No," he replied truthfully. "I'm not."  
______________

Things turned physical with Clint exactly the way that Phil had expected them to with Natasha. On the carrier, after a mission, they were in a too-small bunkroom with Clint bent over on the bottom bunk, tilting his head to let Phil inspect a thin cut across his temple. Clint was practically vibrating with unspent energy, and they were too amped up, too ready for a fight that had been over too quickly for either of them. One second, Phil's fingers were pressing lightly to the side of Clint's face, and the next Clint was drawing in a sharp breath, ducking away from his hands and looking up at him.

Phil swallowed against the tightness in his throat, and he held Clint's gaze as he said, "Barton – "with no force behind the warning.

One of Clint's hands reached to touch Phil's thigh, light and almost questioning, the pressure and heat of his hand too close, too welcome, and Phil took an unsteady breath before nodding just once. Clint bit at his bottom lip for a moment, and the simple action looked practically obscene – enough so that Phil couldn't stop himself from sliding his hand down, pressing his thumb to the corner of Clint's mouth and watching how it fell open at the touch.

Phil braced himself against the top bunk as Clint worked his pants down and took him into his mouth, hot and skilled, drawing ragged gasps from Phil's lips as he came. 

He took a moment to collect himself, and then he was grabbing Clint, pulling him up and pushing him against the door, half because he couldn't keep his hands off him another second and half because the last thing he wanted in the world was for that door to open before he got the chance. He jerked Clint off in almost no time at all, and found himself wishing they had more time for him to tease him, to make his hips arch up off the door towards him, maybe to kneel and take him in his mouth. Instead, he tucked Clint back into his pants, cursed under his breath, and said "We can't do this again." He took in the sight of Clint's wet lips, his fingers bracing himself back against the door, and he amended, "Not like this."

He told himself in the months that followed that it didn't count as a lie if he believed it at the time.  
________________

Natasha returned from assignment on a Tuesday, and Wednesday afternoon Phil was called to Fury's office.

"Is he ready?" Fury asked.

There was a part of Phil that wanted to say no, that he needed more time, that Clint might never be team material, but he was something else entirely, something valuable. It was the part of him that rarely won out, though, and never with Fury, so he closed it off, considered, and answered honestly, "Yes, I think he is."

"Good." Fury slid a folder across the desk at him. "This is the new team you'll be supervising," he said, and it was only long years of practice that kept him from laughing right there in front of Fury. 

"Barton thinks this was your doing," Natasha said a while later, slipping into his office and closing the door behind her.

"Welcome back," he replied. "And no, he doesn't." He looked up at her. "Is this your way of saying that _you_ think I pulled strings?"

She made a face. "I've met Fury," she reminded him.

"So has Barton."

There was a ghost of a smile as she replied, "Barton hasn't been reporting directly to him for nearly two years."

"No," Phil agreed. "He hasn't." He rubbed at the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes, then looked back up at her. "He knows this wasn't my doing. He asked."

She raised an eyebrow. "And you think he believes you?"

"I don't lie to Barton," he replied simply, and returned to his work rather than try to decipher the expression that flickered across her face.

"He lies to you," she told him eventually.

"Not very well," Phil pointed out. "Not as well as you do." He looked up and smiled mildly. "You'll make a good team."

She looked at him for a long time, as if deciding whether to make the reply she wanted. In the end, her expression softened a little, and she said, "It might be nice, having backup again."

He raised an eyebrow. "You already trust Barton to have your back?" he asked. "How long have you known him? Eight hours?"

"You trust him," she said. "That will be sufficient, for now." She turned to the door and raised her voice. "You might as well come in, instead of lurking in the hallway," she called, and there was a prolonged pause before the door swung open, and Clint's head appeared.

"I heard my name," he said. 

"I'm sure you heard a lot more than that," Natasha said, brushing by him as she left, and Phil watched Clint's eyes follow her down the hallway.

"She might trust me already," he said, stepping into the office and flopping down into one of the chairs, "but I've still got my doubts about her."

Phil nodded. "As it should be," he said. "Welcome to partnership, Barton."

Clint made a face. "If you tell me it's like a marriage – " he began, but Phil cut him off with a shake of his head.

"I was going to go with minefield," he said, and was gratified by the laugh it dragged from Clint, almost reluctantly. He sobered. "I meant it, though. You will be a good team." He paused. "Eventually."

"And until then?"

Phil shrugged. "Guess I better get used to going into the field with you both, for a while."  
______________

On paper, they were a two-man team with a one-man support crew. In practice, Phil logged more field hours than any three other handlers combined.

Their clearance rate was astronomical, and they fit together as if they'd always been working that way, the three of them revolving around each other seamlessly. In the beginning, Clint and Natasha fought with each other as often as they fought alongside each other, but it was their way of testing, of learning lines and limits, and Phil had never expected them to work together the same way that they functioned with him, so he let it happen, and pretended not to see the bruises.

He expected that eventually the fighting would turn to fucking, but it never did, not until the mission where they had barely made it back onto the carrier before Natasha was at Clint's throat, right there in front of Hill, slamming him back against the wall and cursing him out soundly in Russian. It took a sharp " _Romanoff_ ," from Phil before she pulled away, looking not even the slightest bit remorseful, and stalked off down the hallway, leaving Clint there tugging at his collar and gasping for breath.

Hill raised an unimpressed eyebrow at Phil and followed Natasha down the hall, and Phil barely waited for her to round the corner before he was taking Natasha's place, pressing Clint backwards and gripping the front of his field suit.

"You get your shit together," he said severely, and pretended not to be fazed by the sardonic "Yes _sir_ " Clint gave him in reply.

They left base together that night, Clint's hand pressed to Natasha's back as they got into the elevator, and Phil wanted to give them some kind of grief about learning the meaning of circumspect, except that everyone already assumed they'd been sleeping together from the beginning, so he decided it didn't matter. He went home alone and had a beer on the couch, flipping through the channels and trying to think about anything but the unbearable intensity of the two of them in bed together.

Clint still found him sometimes, after missions, their hands finding each other's bodies in cramped spaces, breathless and fast and almost too much to take, and it was only a matter of time before he opened his door one night to find Natasha in his hallway, Clint hovering by her side looking out of place and more unsure than Phil had ever seen him.

"This is the worst plan either of you has ever had," he said, "and that includes a few that got one of us shot." He held the door open for them, though, and when he closed it behind them, he was the one who reached for Natasha, pulling her in and tasting her mouth for the first time in too many years, familiar and somehow subtly changed, her hands still finding the places along his sides that made him shiver and pull her closer.

When they broke apart, Phil was gasping for breath, and instead he found Clint's mouth pressing to his, desperate and claiming in a way they'd never been with each other. He couldn't help letting out a low noise and reaching up to grip Clint's hair, holding him close, and when they finally broke apart to breathe, he looked over Clint's shoulder to see Natasha making her way to the bedroom, dropping clothes on his floor as she went.

"Jesus _fuck_ ," Clint breathed, turning to follow Phil's line of sight, and Phil breathed out a laugh, pushing against Clint until he could pull himself away from the door.

"Yeah," he agreed, and they shared a moment of _this is happening_ before Clint was peeling off his shirt and following Natasha to the bedroom, not looking back to see if Phil was behind him, just trusting that he would be.  
_______________

It was three months later that they were both captured in Columbia, and when Phil went in with the retrieval squad, he killed each one of the targets himself, despite orders to bring them in alive.

The next day, he went to Fury and requested reassignment.  
______________

He returned to solo work, and found it a welcome change of pace – only himself to look out for, the missions more personal and more often undercover than he'd been used to, and in his brief conversations with Fury, he began to slowly put together the pieces of the project that SHIELD was trying to assemble. Clint and Natasha, meanwhile, were kept as a pair, but reassigned to a new handler.

Their time in town only overlapped occasionally, but when it did, the nights ended with the three of them, maybe at a bar, maybe on Natasha's couch, but always them, together, and Phil started to feel like maybe this was a scenario with some long term potential.

Then came the Stark job, when he turned a corner in the mansion to find Natasha standing there, looking impossibly young and perfectly staged to catch Tony Stark's eye, and he couldn't help it – he laughed right out loud, right there in Stark's hallway where there were probably three different security cameras on him.

"Is somebody trying to tell me something?" he asked.

Natasha smiled at him coolly and breezed by him without an answer, but on the flight back to HQ, she pulled a heavy pile of folders out of the bag beside her and started stacking them on the tray in front of him, one at a time. "Hamburg," she said, "Sydney. Toronto, Paris, Madrid '06, Tokyo, Des Moines, Beijing, Madrid '08." She looked up at him. "Let me know when you're sensing a pattern."

"Natasha – " he began, but she continued.

"San Diego, San Francisco, San Antonio."

"You've made your point."

"Have I?" Her expression was steely and determined. "Because I don't think you're convinced, and you need to be. You of anyone knows what Fury's planning, and I think you know that none of it is going to come together the way he wants it to if you don't get your head out of your ass."

"I disregarded orders," Phil said stiffly. 

"Who hasn't?"

"You."

She shrugged and arched an eyebrow. "That's because I'm perfect," she told him, and anyone who hadn't known her for as long as he had would have missed the smile. She tapped the stack of files in front of him. "Every mission here is one where you saved the lives of myself or Agent Barton, and everyone else involved. And every one of them occurred while you were sleeping with one or both of us." She looked at him seriously. "You made a bad call, Coulson. One, in how many years with the agency? How long with Fury before that?" He didn't answer. "You are capable of working with us. You are, in fact, at your best when working with us."

He couldn't deny it. "This isn't coming from you, is it?"

"Yes," she replied. "But not exclusively." 

"I no longer trust my ability to be objective," he admitted.

"I do," she told him. "So does Clint, and more importantly, so does Fury." She smiled faintly. "Besides, the way it looks like things are going, I think a lot of rules are very close to being thrown out the window with regards to this new initiative. It's likely that objectivity is no longer going to be a concern." She nudged him with an elbow. "Don't tell me you're capable of being objective about Tony Stark. I'll never believe it."

He let out a laugh, and she reached for the files, but he deflected her. "No, it's all right," he said, "I'd like to look at them."

He took the rest of the flight back to flip through the mission reports, relearning details he'd forgotten, and when he got back to HQ and was called in front of Fury's desk, he still had them tucked under his arm.

"A little light reading?" Fury asked, raising an eyebrow, and Phil didn't feel the need to answer.

"You needed something, sir?" he asked instead.

"Your team, for New Mexico," Fury told him. "I was wondering if there was anyone you'd like in particular. Bearing in mind that I need Romanoff here, that is."

Phil felt a smile tug at his lips. "I think this job might benefit from a good marksman, actually," he said.

"Good choice," Fury replied with no expression at all. He waited for Phil to turn for the door before adding, "Welcome back, Agent."

Phil left without answering, and when he got back to his office, Clint was there, sitting in his chair and waiting for him, spinning at increasing angles back and forth. "Everything good?" he asked, pausing his swiveling to look up at Phil in the doorway.

Phil considered for a moment, then smiled and nodded. "Yeah," he said honestly. "I think everything might be."


End file.
